Re: next gen kepler to support dx 11.1, also take a year to rollout all cards

It is true that the high end parts for ATI have been within roughly the same max power limit for the last few generations(about 210 to 225 watts), as i don't remember the HD 6970 using more power than the HD5870, or these new HD7970's using more power then the HD6970's under load, and the transistor budget between the HD5870 and HD7970 doubled(2.15 billion to 4.3 billion), and of course the process changed from 40 nm to 28nm, but the die sizes aren't hugely different either, going from 315mm^ to 389mm^ and back to 365mm^ respectively for all 3 generations.

So they stay within reasonable ranges for power and die size, and the common point with Kepler is that it's TSMC mass producing Kepler chips, including the very highest end version using that same 28nm process, so if we start hearing that it's using a much higher transistor budget than AMD's high end GPU, power concerns might possibly pop up unless it runs at lower clocks, but they can't avoid getting less chips per wafer even if yeilds were 100%, as the GPU die is larger too as a consequence of the higher transistor budget anyhow, so production costs are automatically higher for them than for AMD, and Nvidia needs to order more wafers from TSMC to make up the shortfall.